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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
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Watchmen
EMAILPRINTWarner Bros. Pictures

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 39 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 771 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Action | Adventure | Fantasy | Sci-fi | Suspense/Thriller
Written by:
Alan Moore (graphic novel)
Dave Gibbons (graphic novel illustrator)
Alex Tse
David Hayter
Directed by: Zack Snyder
Release Date:
Theatrical: March 6, 2009
DVD: July 21, 2009
Running Time: 163 minutes, Color
Origin: UK | USA
Summary
RATING: R for strong graphic violence, sexuality, nudity and language
Starring Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode, Billy Crudup, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman, Carla Gugino, Stephen McHattie, and Matt Frewer
Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the outlawed but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion--a disbanded group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers--Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity...but who is watching the Watchmen? (Warner Bros.)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: 300 Dawn of the Dead
GAMES: Watchmen: The End is Nigh (Xbox Live Arcade)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
New York Post Kyle Smith
Director Zack Snyder's cerebral, scintillating follow-up to "300" seems, to even a weary filmgoer's eye, as fresh and magnificent in sound and vision as "2001" must have seemed in 1968, yet in its eagerness to argue with itself, it resembles "A Clockwork Orange."
Read Full Review >Premiere Patrick Parker
The whole thing works, especially for the non-comic audience. Plus, the music is perfect, especially the opening montage set to Bob Dylan's, "The Times They Are a-Changin."
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
It's a compelling visceral film -- sound, images and characters combined into a decidedly odd visual experience that evokes the feel of a graphic novel. It seems charged from within by its power as a fable; we sense it’s not interested in a plot so much as with the dilemma of functioning in a world losing hope.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Part conscious and part unconscious, Watchmen tells us of a world without hope and then makes us wonder if we're already living in it.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
A terrific comic-book movie, the most completely satisfying and unsettling one I've ever seen.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The casting clicks; the visuals have leaped right out of Dave Gibbons' original panels; the action is brutal, stylish and well-staged, and -- with most of the major characters, themes and symbolism are retained in an abbreviated form -- the 2 1/2-hour film makes an enjoyably esoteric Cliff's Notes version of the book.
Read Full Review >Empire Ian Nathan
Okay, it isn't the graphic novel, but Zack Snyder clearly gives a toss, creating a smart, stylish, decent adaptation, if low on accessibility for the non-convert.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
Watchmen has moments of greatness. It proves again that the action movie is where the best young Hollywood brains have gone to bring flesh to their fantasies.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Cammila Albertson
It may not include every nuance of the graphic novel, but it captures as much as any adaptation could -- which may not satisfy the fanboys, but it's probably more than enough for everyone else.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Watchmen is a fitting tribute to Alan Moore's fascinating graphic novel, even if he refused to let his name be used in the credits.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
This movie will shake your windows and rattle your walls.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
Snyder's Watchmen keeps moving so assuredly, it's nearly impossible not to get swept along.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
Like the writings of William Burroughs or Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," Watchmen falls into the category of what might be called meta-pulp, a multilayered fiction that serves as a parody and commentary on our collective bottom-feeding fantasies.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
The 155 minutes of Watchmen are studded with inspired spectacles: fights and flights and imaginary creatures and reworked bits of history.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Even Watchmen fanatics may be doomed to a disappointment that results from trying to stay THIS faithful to a comic book.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
For the Watchmen fan, this may be as close to the Holy Grail as a motion picture could come. For everyone else, a sense of frustration and disappointment is not unwarranted. Watchmen is many things but it is not the Next Great Comic Book Movie or the film that will advance graphic novel adaptations to the next level.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Stumbles and sometimes falls on its top-heavy ambitions. But there are also flashes of visual brilliance and performances, especially from Haley and Crudup, that drill deep into the novel's haunted soul.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
The best moments in Watchmen, then, work as delirious music-videos.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Snyder stands revealed here as more of a beginner than a visionary in his uncertain approach to making an on-screen world come alive.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
The most pleasant surprise in the movie adaptation of "Watchmen" is the pop-art fusion set off by placing superheroes in a "real" world. The film's biggest challenge – and accomplishment – was making that plausible.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
In the canon of comic-book movies, it's not as campy bad as the "Batman" starring George Clooney, but nowhere near the caliber of the Spider-Man movies or "The Dark Knight." It may have more style, but it's only a jot more entertaining than "Catwoman."
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Watchmen is neither desecratory disaster nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse's adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address the cult while pandering to the masses.
Read Full Review >Variety Justin Chang
The movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there's simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Philip Kennicott
Watchmen is a bore. Sad to say, after a wait of more than two decades, the much-anticipated adaptation of the world's most celebrated graphic novel is long, dull and subject to what might be called the "Lord of the Rings" problem: It sinks under the weight of its reverence for the original.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
Watchmen fans wondering whether their graphic novel has been ruined will be thrilled to see its key scenes reproduced with storyboardlike fidelity, but those who've never read it will be unlikely to understand what the big deal was in the first place.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Watchmen is worth seeing, fan or no, for Haley's squirmy presence alone, and all the other characters are also well-served.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
Watchmen is indeed gorgeous, with Gibbons' original work reproduced and – in some cases – improved upon by detailed F/X, but even at a healthy two hours and 41 minutes the story feels truncated. Even abrupt.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Although the film's visuals are a cut above, say, "Sin City," another serioso graphic novel-turned-movie, it has the same mood: a film-noir-ish soddenness punctuated by megaviolence. Watchmen is the anti-"Incredibles."
Read Full Review >NPR Bob Mondello
The director recycles some of the better effects from his gladiator epic "300"...and he's being so faithful to the work of comics artist Dave Gibbons that he might as well have used the graphic novel's illustrations as a storyboard.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Noah Berlatsky
Director Zack Snyder races through the story, faithfully reproducing this bit of dialogue from Moore and that bit of imagery from Gibbons but never pausing to develop a vision of his own. The result is oddly hollow and disjointed; the actors moving stiffly from one overdetermined tableau to another.
Read Full Review >Newsweek Devin Gordon
Speaking as an admirer, but not an apostle, of the graphic novel, I thought the Watchmen movie was confusing, maddeningly inconsistent and fighting a long, losing battle to establish an identity of its own.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
As it is, the film is more curiosity than provocation, an artifact of a faded world brought to zombie half-life by the cinematic technology of the present.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
The appeal of the film version, such as it is, relates almost entirely to eye-for-an-eye, severed-limb-for-a-limb vengeance, two hours and 41 minutes of it, with just enough solemnity to make anyone who thought "The Dark Knight" was a little gassy think twice about which superhero myth THEY'RE calling gassy.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
The film's storytelling and image-making lack originality and vitality. Nothing sticks to your memory unless you come in with recollections of the book.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
This kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Snyder and writers David Hayter and Alex Tse never find a reason for those unfamiliar with the graphic novel to care about any of this nonsense. And it is nonsense.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Elegance isn't Zack Snyder's bag; a certain sort of impact is. Watchmen establishes him as Hollywood's reigning master of psychic suffocation.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.5 (out of 10) based on 771 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Matt F gave it a6:
This 300 like superhero film is an awesome form of entertainment, though, it is not a great movie because of its weird soundtrack and its distraught and unaccomplished plot, untill a 5 minute scene at the end where if you blink you wont get the whole movie or where 30 minutes of the movie has anything to do with the plot. It has a great daily dose of action, sex, and gore, so it deserves a good solid 6.
Trey H. gave it an8:
all i have to say is that why are you fan boys picking on watchmen you think it is easy to create a film this epic. I do have to say it was a littile bit long but who cares. I have read the comic book twice researched on it and even wrote papers on why this is a good movie. all you people who think this is crap come on you have no patince there is nothing wrong with this film as a fan of the book i would say this is the cloest we are going to get anyway. why bad mouth a movie if al you are thinking about is how close it is to the comic when that is impossbile. and if you guys ever write some crap sayng it wasnt good you are just fat nerds trying to be picky. you dont have th attention span of a fat mouse.
Joe F gave it a10:
Every super hero movie should be like this!
T L gave it a9:
I tried watching this movie about a month ago and literally fell asleep 30 minutes in. I guess it wasn't what I expected. Still, I knew it had 'something'. I revisited it last night... with an open and focused mind. It really is quite brilliant.
Sean M gave it a2:
Take out the subtlety, pile on the violence. Books and movies are different media, and should not be mixed. Would you turn a painting into a photo? Good soundtrack, though.
Keith P gave it a10:
I like Watchmen. I don't care what anyone says about the movie. The film is boring and I like the action in it. I give this movie an A+.
Eric L gave it a9:
I have the director's cut and it is amazing and long, too. I don't really have too much to say that hasn't been said before. I never read any of the comic books but the story is really captivating. The film is really violent and gritty, but it never seems like it's trying too hard to be that way; it's stylized like in Kill Bill. The only complaint about it that I have is that the music montauge at the begining took FOREVER.
